Part of the American History & Genealogy Project

Frances E. Beauchamp 1857 ~ 1923

Frances E. Beauchamp

Mrs. Beauchamp, reformer and lecturer, was born in Madison County, Kentucky, in the home of her paternal ancestor, General Samuel Estill, and was of the fifth generation born on the old farm which was taken up from the Commonwealth of Virginia by his progenitors.

She was an only child, of a highly imaginative temperament and spent her childhood in dreamland. Trees, flowers and animals became sentient beings with a vivid personality, among which she moved and conversed. Hours were daily given to this imaginative existence and but for the fact that her parents were intensely practical and insisted on regular habits and a systematic performance of the tasks assigned, she would probably have gone through life a visionary, and not the highly sensitive, keenly responsive and eminently practical woman that her mature years have given to her day and generation.

She attended a private school in Richmond, Kentucky, until her ninth year and established herself at the head of her classes, being prominently expert in mathematics. She was devoted to her teacher, the Reverend R. L. Breck, and was deeply grieved when her parents removed her from this school to Science Hill, Shelbyville, Kentucky.

Her education covered the English branches, music and French. She was graduated from this institution in her sixteenth year and was to have been finished abroad, but instead married during the year, J. H. Beauchamp, a rising young lawyer, whoever shared her ambitions and encouraged her work. She has been devoted to her church and a local philanthropist from her youth.

In 1886 she joined the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and in the fall of that year was made corresponding secretary of the 'State Union. The following year she was appointed superintendent of juvenile work for Kentucky. In 1894 she was made one of the recording secretaries of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and in 1895 was elected president of the Kentucky Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which office she is ably filling at the present time.

She is a speaker of rare quality, uniting eloquence and force in a logical presentation of facts.

Women of America

Source: The Part Taken by Women in American History, By Mrs. John A. Logan, Published by The Perry-Nalle Publishing Company, Wilmington, Delaware, 1912.